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How to stream output of system process in Ruby rake task?

Often time, I use Rake to manage a number of tasks I use often, but I can’t remember the command. It’s part of building tools for yourself to make yourself more productive.

Sometimes, you use rake tasks to run servers, like so:

desc "Start the server"
task :start do
puts `node app.js`
end

However, that doesn’t work. The child process blocks, and won’t return until the server exits, so that means `puts` never gets a return, and hence never executes. In addition, stdout of the child process running node isn’t connected to the stdout of the parent process running rake. Therefore, you won’t see any output from the server.

Finally, being fed up with the situation, I started looking around on google and stackoverflow, and it’s kind of an elusive question. But I finally have it. It looks like this: